About the interview: There is an emptiness that invites us all to escape. I did, for a while, living for 10 years without electricity in a self-built cabin in Northern Ontario, Canada.

William Powers did. And who is he? Google tells me about an American from Long Island, an international development and aid worker in poorer countries, a man concerned with the extinction of people, languages, and Nature.

William Powers’ writing appears in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and many others. He’s got degrees from Brown University and Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. He’s even worked for the World Bank, – we’ll forgive that. Bill is now a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute.

But William Powers had to leave all that, to find himself. In a Twelve by Twelve cabin in North Carolina. A place with no power, no address, and a creek with no name.

We learn a lot about our consumer society, when we leave.

If we can leave. I ended up near a uranium mine. With the wind just right, Bill Powers could smell the industrial chicken barns that power obesity in America. It’s hard to be Henry David Thoreau, on Walden Pond, with military jets screaming in the sky.

I think you’ll like the interview. It sure comes out we don’t need 3,000 square foot homes to be happy.

The book has lots of good ideas about rethinking ourselves, as well as our society. And what if feels like to reconnect to Nature again.